What Would Lincoln Do?

Richard Brookhiser is the author of James
Madison (Basic Books) and Founding Father: Rediscovering George
Washington (Free Press).

Abraham Lincoln,
whose birthday we mark this holiday weekend, had less leadership
experience than almost any earlier president.
George Washington
and
Andrew Jackson
had been generals, several other presidents had been governors,
and all the Southerners had owned plantations. They had run
organizations and managed men. President Lincoln, by contrast, was a
former state legislator, a one-term congressman and the senior partner
of a two-man law firm; he kept his most important papers filed away in
his hat.

And yet Lincoln filled the office of president so effectively that he regularly tops historians' rankings of great presidents.

It
helped, of course, that he was one of the greatest writers in the
American canon—certainly the greatest ever to reach the White House
(Jefferson at his best could be equally good, but his range was
narrower). Leaving aside such extraordinary talents, which of Lincoln's
principles of action can guide his successors?

Cite precedent. Lincoln
the lawyer was ever mindful of precedents, while Lincoln the unhappy son
who never bonded with his hard-driving, un-bookish father was always
looking for paternal surrogates. He found both precedents and men he
could look up to in America's founding fathers....